But more significantly, it inspired conversations within families: between the generation that had witnessed Partition and those who had only inherited its memories. It was acclaimed for the freshness of its approach to a decades-old, much-written-about subject.

It told a human history of the monumental event by exhuming the stories lying latent in ordinary objects that survivors had carried with them across the newly made border. It pieces together an alternative history of the Partition – the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later, lest we forget.Oral historian Aanchal Malhotra's first book, Remnants of a Separation, was published in 2017 to mark the seventieth anniversary of India's Partition. Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, Remnants of a Separation tells stories from both sides of the border and is the product of years of painstaking and passionate research. A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh zila, now in Bangladesh. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman’s determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. They now speak of their owner’s pasts as they emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history.Ī string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. Remnants of a Separation is a unique attempt to revisit the Partition through objects that refugees carried with them across the border. This eld her to search for the belongings of other migrants to discover the stories hidden in them. A gaz, a ghara, a maang-tikka, a pocketknife, a peacock-shaped bracelet, and a set of kitchen utensils: these were what accompanied her great-grandparents as they fled their homes, and through them she learnt of their migration and life before the Divide.

Generations have grown up outside the shadow of the communal killings and mass displacement that shaped the contemporary history of the subcontinent.ĭespite being born into a family affected by the Divide, artist and oral historian Aanchal Malhotra too had thought little about the Partition – until she encountered objects that had once belonged to her ancestors in an Undivided India. SEVENTY YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE PARTITION, and a momentous event now recedes in memory.

Aanchal malhotra partition